


the houses were humming all through the night

by dadvans (orphan_account)



Series: the houses were humming all through the night [2]
Category: South Park
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-21
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-08 12:07:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3208577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/dadvans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stan is trying to get his music career back on track, having derailed it completely as a troubled teen idol.  When an old acquaintance shows interest in hiring him for an annual desert party, Stan jumps at the opportunity to get back in touch. ["smug alert!" canon-divergent AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. february.

This is a bad idea, Stan thinks as he watches Kyle through the bakery windows, hands in his back pockets ordering something from the barista at the counter.  Kyle’s got a pant leg rolled up to his knee, and he’s unironically wearing what is probably a woman’s nordic cardigan and a green knit beanie riddled with holes that remind Stan achingly of Kyle’s old ushanka, and and and, Kyle has a _beard_ , and this is a bad, terrible idea.  Sweat has been pooling under Stan’s armpits the whole drive here, he probably smells awful, he probably looks as bad as the two nights of sleep he hasn’t gotten if he takes off his sunglasses--he could leave right now, text Kyle that he’s canceling.  They can run parallel for the rest of their lives and never meet again, and the scared, anxious part of Stan says _that’s okay_.

Kyle, inside, rolls on the back of his heels and pulls at his phone to thumb away at the screen while he waits for his order and waits for Stan.  The bakery has this minimalist interior, lots of white wainscotting and subway tile that makes Kyle look even more radiant, so vibrant that even if Stan walked by him on the street as a stranger, he would have looked twice.  It pulls him inside without being able to think about it more, like a moth to Kyle’s wild, bearded flame.  Kyle looks up from his phone when he enters, then back down, then back up in a quick second of recognition.  He almost drops his phone.

Stan has spent the last twenty-odd hours in a car trying to think of what the first thing he’s going to say to Kyle’s face in twelve years should be.  He’s tried, in several intonations out-loud to his reflection in the rearview mirror: How are you?  Where have you been? Who are you now?  Who is your best friend?  Do you ever dream about South Park?  Do you ever wonder where we would be if you’d stayed?  

The first thing Stan says to Kyle in twelve years instead is, “hey.”

Hey, in lieu of throwing up all over the coffee shop’s black welcome mat.  Hey, except it sounds like, I missed you so much some days I thought you were never real at all.   

“Holy shit,” Kyle says. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Stan says again, because all of the questions he’s carried around with him the past decade have peaced out of his brain along with the rest of the English language.  “You have a beard.”

“I do,” Kyle agrees, reaching up to rub at it thoughtfully.  He looks proud of it, like he knows how well it fits his face, how good he looks with age.  “Are you okay?  You look like you’re going to hurl.”

“I’m not going to hurl,” Stan says, mostly for his own benefit.  The entire drive up he’s only eaten massive amounts of beef jerky and 7-11 cheesesteak taquitos washed down with about twenty gallons of double dew, and the reality of Kyle in front of him is making him start to feel it roll back up his throat all at once.  “Probably not.  I might.”

A nervous laugh bubbles out of Kyle.  “Do you not want coffee?  We can uh, go somewhere else, I guess.”

The thought of putting more caffeine in his body right now makes his stomach churn in protest, but he’s not going to make this more awkward than it already is, so he waves dismissively at Kyle’s suggestion and walks over to the counter.  

“No, no, here’s good.  Here’s fine.  I’ll be fine,” he lies under his breath.  His hands are shaking when he takes out his wallet.

The guy at the counter looks at him like he’s seeing God.  “Are you uh, Stan Marsh?”

“Yeah,” Stan sighs.  “Can I get a tall drip?”

“Sure.”  He puts a hand up when Stan tries to thumb out his credit card.  “Don’t even--it’s on the house, man.”

Stan shrugs, puts a few bucks in the tip jar, and walks over to stand next to Kyle, who’s still waiting for his coffee.  He puts his shaking hands in his back pockets, sweaty palms rubbing into the denim.  Stan hasn’t received the celebrity treatment as often since he moved back to South Park four years ago, mostly just the small town disappointed recognition treatment.  Only on the drive up did he get a single “holy shit, Stan Marsh!” at a gas station in Eugene.  It feels like putting on an old winter sweater that’s been tucked away for months, one that’s gotten too tight since he last wore it, makes him itch at the collar.  

Kyle lets his shoulder brush against Stan’s when he reaches for the intricate-looking latte that slides toward him through the window in a small, white mug, and it soothes him.  Stan follows the movement, up Kyle’s hand, tan wrists poking out of the ungodly nordic sweater, up the fraying blue and white knit, to the freckle-pocked neck that disappears into the ginger forest on Kyle’s chin, and Stan can’t stop looking, can’t help how shamelessly he takes in all the amazing things puberty has done to benefit Kyle Broflovski.  Kyle has more moles than he remembers, grew up tall and thin, but not lanky.  The hairs poking out from underneath his beanie look trim and tamed, which is surreal considering all the times Stan woke up during weekend sleepovers in elementary school choking on Kyle’s frankly alarming jewfro.  

“You okay?” Kyle asks, not unkindly, snapping him out of his reverie.

“Yeah.” Stan hadn’t even noticed his coffee sliding through the window in a to-go cup, one size larger than he ordered, too busy taking in Kyle.  “I just.  It’s been forever.  You look--I wasn’t expecting the beard.”

“No?”

“If I’m gonna be completely honest, I don’t know what I expected.  I think I expected you to still be nine and drinking like, a fucking hot chocolate or something.”

“That’s--” Kyle pauses, horror overcoming his features. “--that’s a little messed up, man.”

“I know,” Stan says, pressing his face into his hands.  He’s imagined this going half a dozen different ways over the years, what he would say, how they might be, but he never managed to see Kyle grown up in his mind’s eye, couldn’t bear the thought of Kyle different and changed without him.

“If it helps, I was expecting you to look more famous,” Kyle says frankly.  It shocks a laugh out of Stan.

“Fuck you,” he says, weak with amusement.  “Didn’t you hear the barista? I look super famous.”

“You do not,” Kyle says, eyeing the hoodie that Stan haphazardly threw on before rushing out the door, his greasy, unshowered hair that’s starting to come down over his ears, the stubble on his chin from days of being locked in his studio that still isn’t nearly as impressive as Kyle’s fucking beard, more ingrown hairs than anything.  “But you still look like you.  You look good.”

Stan’s not sure of the last time Kyle saw a picture of him, but roughly around the time that Stan was sixteen, there were a lot of photos circulating of him looking strung out and coke-bloated, camera flash making him blind staggering out of Chateau Marmont like Lindsay fucking Lohan.  There haven’t been too many photos of him since he moved back to South Park, certainly not on check-out aisle magazine covers, but Cartman’s called the paparazzi on him at least three times since his quiet December release.  Still.

“I look haggard as shit, man, what are you talking about,” Stan says, taking an slow, shaky sip of coffee.  “I haven’t showered in three days.”

“Hey, I go to Reed,” Kyle says pointedly.  “We don’t believe in showers.  You look fine.”

“Of course you don’t, you fucking hipster college kid,” Stan says, before he can stop himself.

“Hey,” Kyle says, but he’s grinning.

Stan reaches out and means to clap his hand on Kyle's shoulder, but without thinking he cups Kyle’s face in his hand instead.  It should be weird, but Kyle is warm and solid to the touch and it’s wonderful, the soft places where their bodies meet coming together so seamlessly, and he blurts out, “You look like such a goddamn lumberjack, it’s unreal.”

“Thank you,” Kyle says sincerely, swatting his hand away two or three seconds before he starts laughing, and then Stan is laughing too, the reality of them sharing the same space for the first time in twelve years washing over them in a wave of hysteria.  He’s wiping tears from his eyes.  “Thank you, Stan, you fucking asshole.”

 

x

 

**Kyle Broflovski** ([broflovskik@reed.edu](mailto:broflovskik@reed.edu))

to: ALL [KRRCmaillist]

subject: regarding rotation (2/26) 

hey everyone! your KRRC manager here.  listen, i love you all as if you were my own children, which is to say i grew concerned and worried about all of your futures when i pulled up the weekly logs and saw that my precocious bundle of djs had managed to play the new stan marsh track 224 times in the past week.  you guys.  i realize that the track is delightful, lush, winding, brilliant etc etc whatever other adjectives rolling stone vomited into their review, but this is excessive and i am worried for you.  please play something--ANYTHING--else on your next show.  i swear to god the next dj who plays that song is getting put on suspension.  this isn’t Z100.  okay?  okay.  love you babies.  

broflovski

 

x

 

Kyle wants him to play a show.

“I mean, sort of,” Kyle elaborates in the most ineffective way possible.  “It’s an end-of-the-year thing in the desert.”

“Like Burning Man?” Stan asks, taking a sip of his coffee.  His hands have stopped shaking in the past few minutes, relaxing with muscle memory of Kyle’s old beats and rhythms.  

“No.  Well.”  Kyle looks frustrated by the comparison and shrugs. “Like Burning Man Lite.  It’s a one night party to celebrate finals being over.  We usually get a few local artists to play, and some kids in the art department build this huge party tent.  Here, let me show you.”

He pulls out his phone and after a few seconds of tapping at his screen, he’s sliding it over to Stan.  There are hundreds of grainy night photos on the screen, mostly people illuminated in grey bonfire smoke; shirtless guys with body paint smeared over their chests, some girl riding an inflatable shark down a sand dune, Kyle wearing aviators sitting on the hood of someone’s dustry truck, surveying the madhouse like he’s their king.

“That’s last year,” Kyle clarifies.  “We got Magic Fades to play, but they were way too low-key and sultry, and the whole thing turned into this messy orgy.”

“Desert orgies are the worst,” Stan says, and Kyle looks up at him with a horrified, knowing stare.  “Joking.  I’m really, honestly joking.”

“You wouldn’t if you had been there,” Kyle says, grabbing the phone back before Stan can find the more compromising photos.  “Sand, everywhere, for weeks.”

“Gross,” Stan says, laughing.  Kyle shrugs, smiling a little.

“Here,” he says, tapping away at the touchscreen again, before sliding the phone back to Stan.  “Plans for the preliminary structure of this year’s tent.  A lot sturdier and bigger than it looks, trust me.”

“Let me guess,” Stan says, thumbing through a few skeletal photos of what looks like a ginormous playground piece. “The building’s integrity was compromised last year after everyone started banging?”

Kyle huffs out another laugh.  “Something like that, yeah.”

“Okay, I don’t want to know,” Stan decides.  He puts the phone back down and takes another, steadying sip of coffee.  

Kyle pockets his phone in favor of a well-loved laptop with an MC DREIDEL sticker on the lid. “Other specs-- obviously, our radio station is severely underfunded, which comes as a surprise to no one.  It’s not really in our budget to pay you for playing the show.  Now obviously we could wrangle up any hotel accommodation and travel fees within reason, and okay, if I’m honest, if I announced the likelihood of you showing up we could probably put together a fundraiser to legitimately pay you--”

“I’ll do it.”

“--but.  Wait, what?”

“I mean, it’s not just me.  This is a very tentative yes, I have to speak with the guys, but.  I mean, I’d really like to do this,” Stan says.  “For you, I mean.”

“Stan, you don’t owe me anything,” Kyle says, suddenly serious.  “I just want you to know that.  You don’t owe me anything.  You don’t owe anyone anything.”

“I know that,” Stan says, because years of therapy and rehab have taught him that, if nothing else.  “I’m just--happy that you’re okay.  I’m happy that you made it out, and I made it out, and everyone in their own way, made it out of the most fucked up adolescence ever.  I just, I don’t know.  More than anything, I wanted to know you were okay.”

“I am,” Kyle says dumbly.

He’s more than that, Stan thinks.  Kyle is thriving, tan, radiant, and healthy and alive.  I thought about you every day, he wants to say.  I thought about you wasting away like you were the last time I saw you, and I was worried when I came here you would be next to nothing at all.  And,

“I was stupid to think that you weren’t,” Stan realizes out loud.  

Kyle’s lips zip together.  He looks like he’s considering what to say for a second, too many things rolling around in his mouth at once.  

“I mean,” he finally says, “when we stopped talking I was kind of on acid all the time.”

“We were both messes,” Stan says hastily.  “We should be awarded medals for making it this far.  You, and your parents, and San Francisco, and the acid, and there was me--”

He doesn’t want to get into the past too much, the darker, lonelier years from age ten to forty-eight hours ago.  Kyle is sitting in front of him trying his hardest to be an adult and address him the same, a beat-up college laptop with an amateur business proposal on the screen in between them.  He didn’t come here to take something important away from Kyle by spiralling down into self-pitying recollections of something they didn’t share.  So he stops himself.  

“And here we are now,” Kyle finishes for him.  “Alive and in one piece.”

“Getting ready to play the greatest party the high desert has seen,” Stan continues.  “Which, I can’t promise still won’t turn into a weird orgy.”

It shocks a laugh out of Kyle, who is taking a too-big sip of coffee.  It spills all over the front of his nordic cardigan, which he dabs at with a napkin, a big smile on his face.  “Don’t you fucking dare.  Jesus.  We should probably get back to that, huh?”

The conversation returns to timelines, equipment, a drawn-up contract that looks a little too much like an ethics consent form for a school project.  Kyle is serious, but at least doesn’t act like he’s trying too hard, smiles the entire time and is humble enough to let Stan correct him a few times when his suggestions are downright outrageous.  Stan finds himself lulled into comfortable conversation only to be shocked when Kyle is shutting his laptop and putting it back into the canvas satchel he brought with him.  

“I’m really cutting it close with the deadline, but I think the risk was worth it,” Kyle is saying, though Stan isn’t sure what about.  They’re getting up now,  all visual cues are telling him, this is the part where they separate and leave and don’t see each other for two more months.  The same anxiety that was weighing him down when he first got here, pleading with him not to go inside, is now making his heart beat like a drum into his chest at the thought that Kyle is leaving him so soon again.

“Do you have plans tonight?” Stan says, cutting off Kyle in the middle of a sentence.  Kyle has his shoe on his chair, rolling up his pant leg again.  He stops to stare at Stan, mouth hanging open.

“Uh,” he manages.

“I mean, I’m in the area for at least the night and, well, we could get dinner or something.”  The suggestion comes out rapid fire, so fast there probably weren’t even vowels between the consonants.

“I would love that,” Kyle says, except there’s a lingering awkwardness at the end where a “but” should be.

“But?”

“But there’s a party tonight.  At my house.” Kyle says.  “It’s the radio station’s thirtieth anniversary.  I would usually cancel, but it’s kind of a big deal.”

Stan stares at him dumbly, not sure how to continue.  Tomorrow, for breakfast?  Do you have classes later, would you want to drink more coffee with me?  Can I come to your house and roll around in your sheets like a dog, wait for you to get home?

“You could come,” Kyle continues.  “Actually that would be--if you wanted to come, that would be great.  Not so I could show you off, I mean!  Not that you’re something to show off.  I mean, you are, but--"

“Whoa,” Stan says, “I get it.  You don't mind if I crash your party?”

“No.  I mean, yeah, you can,” Kyle says, and the smile on the face is so genuine and bright that Stan feels that wintery feeling all over again, tight wool sweater scratching at his collar, clouds parting on a sub-zero day in January and the sunlight glaring off the ice, so welcome it hurts.  More confidently, Kyle says again, “yeah, you can crash my party.”

 

x

 

**Pitchfork Best of 2014: Mountain Town EP**

_December 31st, 2014_

_Jack Brollin_

Internet, we’re going to level with you.  If you had told us at the beginning of the year that Stan Marsh was still out there making music, we would have just expressed our relief that he was still alive.  What more can you say about the child stars that crash and burn into obscurity except you’re happy when they survive through adulthood?  You certainly can’t say you’re happy that they’re back and making more manicured, love-lorn garbage neatly packaged in over-mixed cellophane.  (Well, you can, but we will judge you.)

We would have been wrong to be so dismissive, internet.  Shame on us.  Who would have guessed that we would be so lucky for Marsh to sleepily creep back into our lives and hearts?  Finally rid of his handlers at Hollywood Records, Marsh blossoms into a force of nature on the five-track Mountain Town EP,  which was released without fanfare in the middle of December, and quickly became the much-needed reprieve as the annual holiday pop music assault reached its peak.  Each song is its own unique brand of dizzying synthesizers and burly, aggressive bass amounting to one big “fuck you” directed not just at the nay-sayers of Marsh’s troubled youth, but also the aforementioned handlers who kept him on such a tight, creative leash.  The only tragedy surrounding Marsh this time is hindsight; knowing now he was always a capable, talented artist.  But at least now we know the healing process can begin.  The time is here.  We can only hope moving into 2015 that Mountain Town was a teaser of what’s to come in the New Year.

 

x

 

Stan checks into the Marriott Downtown and instantly takes a shower.  He plans on spending the rest of his afternoon drowning in his own drool underneath a 700-fill down comforter, but as he’s toweling himself off he sees his phone light up with a text message.  Upon inspection, he sees it’s Kyle’s number, already saved in his phone.

**Kyle B.**

_hey forgot to mention its a costume thing._

**Kyle B.**

_I mean in no way are you obligated to dress up_

**Kyle B.**

_Or even come i mean seriously i would love it but you’re not obligated or anything_

**Kyle B.**

_Its wes anderson themed bc living in san francisco turned me into a hipster douchebag im sorry_

**Kyle B.**

_so dress up don’t dress up come don’t come no pressure but it was just really good to see you today and i’m excited about future shit_

Under Kyle’s name is a read, but unanswered text from Craig. _you going to kenny's test kitchen thing tonight?_  Stan saw it yesterday afternoon when he was just past Salt Lake City, and he feels like a fuckstick for ignoring it.  Craig only started talking to him again six months ago, and it’s a rare weekend these days when he can afford a break from his academic schedule to drive home from Denver. Stan’s fingers hover over the keyboard of his phone, trying to piece together an acceptable response to the guy who is probably checking dumpsters all over South Park for Stan’s lifeless body.  When he can’t think of anything to send, he takes a few deep breaths and then calls.

Craig picks up on the first ring.

“If you were going to a Wes Anderson-themed costume party, what would you wear?” Stan asks, eyes closed, trying not to sound like the guilty little asshole he is.  

“Nothing, because I would never go to a Wes Anderson-themed costume party, because I hate Wes Anderson,” Craig replies after an uncomfortable pause.  He stills speaks with a constant, nasal flatness that makes him difficult to read, but Stan has known him long and intimately enough to recognize his tics.  Craig sounds pissed.

“Yeah, but at least you’ve watched his movies,” Stan tries, laying down on the bed.  It feels good against his tired back, and he wants nothing more than to close his eyes and will the world away.  

“Yeah, watched, not enjoyed. Why are you going to a Wes Anderson themed party? Where are you?”

“Portland.”  Stan winces when he says it, like he’s bracing for impact.

“What the fuck are you doing in Portland?”

“It’s a weird story.”

“That involves Wes Anderson?”  Stan can practically hear Craig pinching the bridge of his nose from the other end of the line.

“Do you remember Kyle Broflovski from elementary school?”  Stan asks, realizing maybe he should have started here.

There’s another uncomfortable, weighted pause. “You’re hanging out with Kyle?”

“Not hanging out,” Stan says, before quickly amending himself when he realizes how it sounds.  “Well, I will be, I guess.  He’s having this party.  But that’s not why I came up here.”

“When did you leave for Portland?” Craig asks, ignoring Stan completely.  “Token said he saw you on Wednesday night .”

So he has been asking around.  Stan got the first text from Kyle on Wednesday evening, was packed and out the door at ten a.m the next day.  “Thursday morning.”

“Since when have you started talking to Kyle again? He disappeared in the fourth grade.”

“He got my number, I think from our moms,” Stan answers, even if he’s convinced Craig isn’t paying attention.  “He’s doing this college radio thing up here and uh, he wanted me to come play a show for his liberal arts school.”

“That’s a terrible idea.”

“I mean, maybe, but--”

“No, Stan,” Craig cuts him off, and he sounds just as tired as Stan feels. “You have some really terrible ideas sometimes, but this is just.  Really stupid.”

“You’re just saying that because you hate Wes Anderson.”

“No, that’s not. Fuck, Stan. Are you on something?” There’s an angry hollowness there that reminds Stan too much of Craig’s hand holding his, knuckles white, waiting for test results in a walk-in clinic outside of Denver.  Everything about the place had been suffocating; Stan can recall with clarity the sterile white and blue surfaces, the overcrowded seating area, how Craig wouldn’t look at him the entire time, just faced forward and held his hand so tight.  

“No. Dude, we’ve been over this.”

“Yeah, we have.” Craig sounds dismissive, resigned maybe. Stan knows him well enough to know Craig likes to think this isn’t his problem anymore, even if a small part of him still wants it to be.  “Listen, dress up like some douchey, unwashed tennis player from the seventies.  Don’t take off your sunglasses.  I’m sure you’ll look really tragic.  He’ll love it.”

“Craig.”

“I’ll see you when you get back to South Park.” Craig hangs up immediately.

“Fuck.” Stan says, letting the phone slip from his hand to the bed like it betrayed him personally.  Stan distantly recognizes his own behavior is similar to manic, addict behavior, and Craig has bore witness to it more than enough.  Craig has every right to assume it is, to be mad at him, and when Stan goes to wipe his hands over his face he realizes they’re shaking again.

He should probably sleep.  The rational part of him wants to sleep for twelve hours before calling Craig back and apologizing for scaring him.  Instead he winds up googling Wes Anderson characters for a half hour.  He sees Luke Wilson’s dejected tennis player in a wrinkled brown suit, and feels both overwhelmingly connected to the aesthetic, and furious with Craig for knowing him well enough to snidely suggest it.

At the worst part of Stan’s self-medicated depression, the only emotion he could really feel was anger, and the first step of treatment was figuring out how to address that anger without putting more chemicals into his body.  Sometimes, it’s the small things like Craig, _especially_ Craig, knowing Stan on a molecular level that make Stan want to punch walls.  He thinks about past hotel rooms, similar in shape and layout to the one he currently occupies, all the bloody holes he’s left in the plaster from punching and kicking and falling and fucking too hard on one special occasion.  For the first time since Kyle emailed him, he misses using.  

It’s an urge that usually overcomes him countless times a day, and over the stupidest things.  He’ll hit a pothole, miss using.  Wipe the steam off the mirror after a shower, miss using.  Drop lunch off for his mom at her work, kiss her on the cheek, miss using.  He’ll hear a song on the radio and remember some guy’s hands on his hips in the bathroom of some charity gala, the way he felt so steady tearing tin foil into little pieces upstairs at a house party in Rolling Hills, every time someone told him they loved him and he was valuable while he was nodding yes yes yes, all while feeding him pills, and he misses using.

He gets out of the hotel as fast as possible.  Outside he puts his head against the cold brick foundation, and it smells like piss but he breathes it in anyway and listens to the sounds of cars and people on the street and life around him, and it sobers him immediately.

“I’m going to get a taxi,” he tells himself, eyes closed, because making future plans is always the first step.  “I’m going to find the ugliest brown suit in the city, and I’m going to wear it to Kyle’s hipster scum party, and then I’m going to go home and write an album and win a million goddamn Grammys.”  

It helps, a little.

 

x

 

Kyle’s house is recognizable by the three kids on the front porch wearing ironically anachronistic clothing, and also the Tibetan prayer flags strung over the doorway, because of course Kyle is That Guy.  Stan can hear faint hip hop, mostly bass, as he walks up the rain-slick steps to the house.  One of the guys on the porch, notably wearing a boy scout uniform with a raccoon tail hat, drops his beer.

“Stan Marsh?” he says, not even bothering to pick up his cup, hand frozen in mid-air.

“Yeah,” Stan says.  Beer is soaking into his shoes.  “Hey, this is Kyle’s house, right?”

“Oh my God,” the guy says, turning to his friends.  “Oh my god, it’s Stan Marsh.

“Okay, I’m just gonna,” Stan says, awkwardly maneuvering around the three of them and inside, a twelve-pack of Diet Coke under his arm.  Inside the music is louder, the bass is heavier, the lights dim and warm.  There’s a table set up with cheap handles of alcohol and a giant supermarket cake between a few mis-matched, scuffed pieces of furniture, and a guy in the corner spinning some experimental trip hop remix surrounded by swaying twenty-somethings in elaborate, thrift store costumes drinking out of red cups.  As Stan starts to navigate through the crowd to the kitchen he can start to hear his name murmured between them.

He makes it to the kitchen and starts to put his Diet Coke in the fridge, where there is thankfully room for it between cans of craft beer and three expired cartons of eggs.  When he closes the door there’s a girl behind him wearing a retro yellow dress and homemade fox ears caked in hot glue.  

“Jesus!” he says, pressing himself against the fridge, a few magnets sticking into his back.

“Stan Marsh!” she exclaims, putting her hands on his shoulders.  “I thought everyone was joking, but oh my god.  Hi.  You’re here, putting coke in my fridge!  This is unreal.  Is this like, some Bill Murray thing where you come to college parties and do our dishes?”

“I’m not doing anyone’s dishes,” Stan says, looking wearily over at the kitchen sink that is overflowing with dirty pots and plates.  “Your house?  Is this--Kyle lives here, right?"

“Yeah!  He’s my roommate.”  Her eyes go bright and wide when he mentions him. “I didn’t realize you knew Kyle!  He is so cool, right?”

“Um, sure,” Stan says, as someone bumps her from behind into his chest.  “You wouldn’t know where he is, would you?”

“I think he’s outside trying to keep the fire pit alive,” she says.  “Do you need me to take you?”

“I should be okay,” he reassures her, before moving as fast as possible through the crowd of people rapidly accumulating in the kitchen.  It takes him three wrong turns through the sprawling, old house before he finds the back door outside.  Kyle is standing around a sad-looking fire drinking PBR in a crowd of twenty or more.

“Stan!” Kyle says, swaying over when he sees him.  He’s a little red around the eyes already, sporting a blue button up and track pants tight around the thighs that look like they came from a uniform surplus store. He’s replaced his ratty green beanie with an orange one that fades into the darker red of his beard.  It looks like there’s a gun holster strapped to his leg.  “Hey, you dressed up too!”

“It seemed fitting,” Stan says, putting his arms up to re-examine himself from the dirty sweatbands on his wrists and up.  He managed to piece together a brown suit with a polo at a southeast thrift store, and found some ragged striped headband, tinged yellow from use.  He’s also wearing his own oversized sunglasses, which he had hoped would disguise him a little more.  

“And I almost dressed up like Margot too,” Kyle sighs, as he looks up and down Stan again.  He takes a slow, long sip of PBR.

“What?” Stan asks.  

“Like, Margot Tenenbaum?”

“Nope, lost me,” Stan says.

“But you’re dressed as Richie!”  Kyle says, looking for recognition on Stan’s face.  “Holy shit, have you never seen Royal Tenenbaums?”

“Nope,” Stan says, toeing at the soft gravel surrounding the fire pit. “This was one-hundred percent friend suggestion.  I’m just really into committing to a theme.”

“That’s beautiful,”  Kyle says, close enough that Stan can smell his cheap beer breath.  “But honestly, I just want to shut this party down right now and make you watch Royal Tenenbaums.”

“Okay.”  Stan thinks this sounds better than _I would do anything you asked of me, I just want to hang out with you_.

“Don’t tempt me!” Kyle says a little loud, bumping their shoulders together.  “Jesus, I would.  But this is important.  The radio station is my baby.  And we have cake.  Did you see the cake?  Did you get a drink?  Do you--can you drink?  I didn’t even think of that.”

“Uh, I probably shouldn’t.”  Stan does drink, sometimes.  If he had taken Kyle out to dinner tonight he would’ve looked at the wine list, or found a place that had weird cocktails made with smoked turbinado and egg whites like the ones Kenny makes.  “I brought Diet Coke with me.  Your roommate assaulted me when I was sneaking it in your fridge.”

“Oh goddamn it,” Kyle says, frowning.  “She means well.  She’s just really enthusiastic.”

Stan shrugs and tries to find something to do with his hands that isn’t stealing sips of Kyle’s beer or pressing his palm into the small of Kyle’s back and letting it stay there.  “It’s okay,” he says, finally crossing his arms.

“It’s not!  And I didn’t even think-- you really didn’t have to come, I’m sorry if I pressured you.  I don’t know what you’re supposed to be around and avoid.”

Stan actually laughs, because Kyle’s sincerity is refreshing and adorable.  “I’m fine.  I really just wanted to catch up.  We’ll be in trouble when I run out of soda.”

“You sure?” Kyle asks, pointing at him with the same hand that’s holding his beer.

“Yup.  You’re stuck with me.”

Kyle smiles at him, closes his eyes as he downs the rest of his beer, head tilted back so Stan can see his adam’s apple bob under red stubble.  Stan suddenly feels thirsty.  

“I forgot to bring a soda with me when I was inside,” he says, mouth dry.  “So I’m uh.  Gonna get that soda now.”

“Okay.  Hey, and can you get me another beer?  And come back outside!  We’re going to play some life-sized Jenga, I made the blocks myself,” Kyle says, gesturing over to a darker part of the back patio, where there’s a three-foot stack of giant Jenga pieces.

“Such a fucking lumberjack,” Stan says affectionately, and Kyle flips him off as he retreats into the house.  

His trip in and out takes longer than anticipated.  Kyle’s roommate, and three other people stop him inside to make sure he’s really Stan Marsh.  Two of them see the unopened PBR he’s grabbed for Kyle and want to make sure it’s okay that he’s drinking until he attests that he isn’t and holds up the Diet Coke can.  Another person makes sure he gets some cake, and two guys wearing the same costume as him want to take pictures.  

It’s sweet, in an unsettling way, how concerned strangers can be for him.  When he was younger it used to drive him crazy, the millions of people assuming they knew what his life was like from paparazzi photos and OK! magazine articles.  When he moved back to South Park after his first stint in rehab, everyone treated him with an odd mix of sympathetic disappointment, sad to see the prodigal son return.  After his second round in rehab, the reception just became overwhelmingly cold, everyone he knew considering him too broken to fix.  Here, they seem to be genuinely concerned, full of wary admiration.  It’s a sort of positive reception he hasn’t experienced in a very long time.

“Oh hey, I was about to send in a search and rescue,” Kyle says, accepting the beer when he comes back outside.  “Did they assault you more?”

“Yeah,” Stan says, shrugging. “It’s okay though.  I forgot what it’s like.”

“Whatever, I’m just going to make you sign a bunch of random shit in the house before you leave so I can sell it on eBay and pay off my student loans,” Kyle says, herding him over to the giant Jenga blocks where the game has already started.  They end up playing with three other guys for an hour, a larger crowd accumulating outside while they do so.  Stan ends up knocking the tower down the first time, when it’s sitting taller than his six foot frame, and the crowd whoops and some assholes start applauding.  

After the tower falls a second time, one of the guys being a little too drunk and clumsy when trying to tug at the foundation, Stan finds himself in a small group of people heading upstairs.  The party seems to be slowly thinning, the DJ packing up with someone’s iPhone plugged into the speakers playing acoustic music instead, and people have crowded on the ratty chairs and couches to have hushed conversations.  Kyle stops him in the hallway before they turn into his room and presses a hand delicately to his chest and asks him, a little more than buzzed, “please be honest with me, Stan, can I smoke you out?  Because I don’t want to be a bad influence, but I really want to smoke you out.”

It’s one of the few vices that Stan infrequently allows himself, so he nods and lets himself be pulled inside.  Kyle doesn’t have to know that he’s going to fight with Craig about this when he gets back, his mother, Token, Kenny.  Kenny gets pissed at him when he orders a large coffee instead of a medium, and whenever Stan goes to his bar Kenny will only serve him seltzer water with lime.  Kenny is going to be furious.

Kyle’s room is just like the rest of his home; worn, second-hand furniture, a North California flag draped on one wall, and a few dozen photos pinned to the other.  Stan finds himself sitting on Kyle’s twin bed with Kyle, trying not to curl himself up in the flannel sheets and close his eyes.  One of the guys they were playing Jenga with is in a cheap office chair rolling a joint on Kyle’s desk, and another guy is sitting on the floor in little more than a yellow robe, bitching about a local grocery store putting barbed wire around their dumpsters to prevent diving.

The guy in the office chair, wearing a red tracksuit and curly black wig, turns to them while casually twisting the head of a grinder clockwise and counter-clockwise.  “Steve, shut up for a second, I have a question for these losers.  Be honest: Kyle, how the fuck do you know Stan Marsh?”

Stan and Kyle both look at each other a little too wide-eyed.  Stan shrugs.

“We grew up together in Colorado,” Kyle says.  “We lived next door to each other and were basically inseparable through the fourth grade.”

“We’d have really weird adventures together,” Stan cuts in, nudging Kyle with his knee.  “Kyle was still really into playing dress-up back then too.”

“Hey, shut up, these guys think I’m cool!” Kyle says, elbowing him back.

“We don’t,” Yellow Robe supplies.  “But continue.”

“Uh,” Kyle hums.  “I honestly--listen, I can’t remember what is real and what I imagined happening when I lived in South Park.”

“The weirdest was probably the whale,” Stan says.  “What was his name again?”

“Willzyx! I swore I made that up!” Kyle replies, waving his hands.  “It’s one of those things, you know, you spend a few bad years on acid and when you come to you can’t parse out what was real, and the whale thing, Jesus Christ.  What about the time we decided to save baby cows?”

“Oh God,” Stan says, burying his face in his hands.  “We were such nerds.”

“This is so weird,” Tracksuit says, slowly tapping out the contents of his grinder into rolling papers on the desk.  

“The only reason my record label found me is because I wrote a stupid song about buying hybrid cars so Kyle’s family wouldn’t move away,” Stan says, ignoring Tracksuit.

“I think everyone in America was up their own asshole for like, a decade buying hybrids after that song came out,” Yellow Robe says. “My dad buys a new hybrid every four years now, even if it completely defeats the point.”

“I’m sorry?” Stan offers, not the least bit sorry.

“Be sorry for the years of havoc you wreaked on the Billboard Top 100.  I had to listen to your music at all of my school dances in middle school, it was torture,” Tracksuit says, licking the edges of the papers into a tight joint, before passing it to Stan. “Now hit this.”

Everyone is quiet while Stan lights the edge of the joint and breathes it in deep.  It’s like coming home every time, he reflects, staring at it between his fingers.

Yellow Robe cuts through the silence with a cough. “So?  Then what?  Did you sneak Kyle backstage on tour and just terrorize everyone?”

Stan shakes his head, exhaling, before passing it to Kyle.  “Nope,” he coughs out with a mouthful of smoke.  “We just kind of uh.  Fell apart, I guess.  Until like, two days ago.”

“Whoa,” Yellow Robe says.

“Yeah,” Stan says, leaning his full body into the wall, watching Kyle take a drag off the joint.  Kyle closes his eyes when he does so, which should look stupid, but he just looks so content, skin more flushed from the dim lights and the drinking, long red lashes on his cheeks and smoke rolling out of his mouth in a big plume before he sucks it back in.  Stan thinks about the first time he got high, age twelve in a Nashville hotel room as if there was a lost part of himself he could find if he chipped away enough.  He had been so sad then, woke up most mornings feeling like he was missing parts, organs, cogs and wheels, whatever he was made up of.  Stan wonders if this is it, if Kyle is his missing part.

Kyle ashes into his beer can and steals a sip from Stan’s Coke without asking, before proceeding to tell everyone about the time that they accidentally threw a ninja star into their classmate’s eye (“That happened too, right?  And then Cartman walked across the auction stage naked, because he thought he was invisible.  Holy shit, what happened to that fatass?”)  Stan laughs in all the right places, and smokes the joint as it gets passed around again and again until it’s a browned nub between his fingers.  

Yellow Robe leaves soon after they finish smoking, and a few other people come and go, as is the nature of parties.  They continue telling stories, and soon Stan finds himself at Kyle’s picture-plastered wall, pulling off different photos and demanding the stories behind each one; Kyle with longer hair, bundled in a peacoat on an old bridge with an older city in the background (“I studied abroad in Prague last year”); Kyle nude save for bodypaint and a well-placed helmet (“I do the naked bike ride downtown every year”); Kyle asleep on the couch downstairs with at least five beer cans precariously balanced on his forehead (“my friends are dicks”); Kyle with his arms around some beautiful, tan, dark-haired man, the both of them looking radiant and well-dressed at some rooftop bar (“Oh, Javier.  My ex-boyfriend.  We were celebrating his Fulbright scholarship that night.  I should probably take that one down.”)

“What about you?” Kyle asks, stretching out on his bed, his question punctuated by a sudden quiet.  Stan realizes that the house is silent, and there’s no one else in the room anymore.  He puts down the photo of Javier and climbs into the old office chair backwards, folds his arms and lays his chin on the rest.

“What about me?” Stan repeats, smiling weary and just the right amount of baked.  

“We’ve just talked a lot about me.  Where have you been?  What’ve you been doing?”  Kyle rubs sleepily at his eyes, but he looks interested, like he’s going to stay awake and talk to Stan until morning or die trying.

“You know about me,” Stan says, and it comes out sadder than he intends it to. “Depressed kid, did a lot of drugs, went back to South Park with my tail between his legs.”

“Well, I mean, no offense, but everyone knows that,” Kyle says blithely.  He stretches his arms over his head.  “Tell me something you would tell your friends.”

“I don’t have friends,” Stan says a little too fast, wincing at the way Kyle frowns so instinctively.  “I mean, I have friends.  Kenny and I still hang out a lot.  He’s a little overprotective, would hate to know that I smoked tonight, would probably hit me on the nose with a newspaper like a bad dog.  He’s part-owner of an apothecary bar downtown South Park that he’s been working at under the table since high school.  I hang out with Token a lot, who, I mean.  You might have seen him.  He went away to college for a year at Tufts and was discovered by some Ralph Lauren scout, so now he’s dropped out and modelling all over the world.  But he played bass on all of the songs on my last EP, and we get together and play music whenever he’s state-side.  Craig is.  Well.  He’s my Javier.  We just started talking again, but, you know.  We don’t talk-talk about stuff.  I think it’s too much for him, or any of them.”

“Jesus,” Kyle says, and he reaches out for where Stan’s hand is limply dangling off the office chair’s back and twines their fingers together.  “That’s rough.”

Stan shrugs, watching Kyle’s fingers weave innocently with his own, their joints locking together.  He thinks, this, here is where he’s wanted to be since he first heard from Kyle, maybe even longer.  “I can be a surprisingly private person for someone who used to get attacked regularly by the paparazzi.  It’s not all bad.”

“No, I mean,” Kyle re-adjusts himself so he can get a better look at Stan’s face, “dating Craig!  He was such a little turd in elementary school.  When did the wizard give him a heart?”

“Dude, you are probably the only person in the world who will ever take my side in that relationship,” Stan says, before quickly amending, “Even if he still is a total douche.”

“I’m sure that’s not all true,” Kyle says, and it sounds like a plea, like, tell me, tell me, tell me.  And truly, there’s a lot to tell.  When Stan came out of rehab the first time he didn’t care about anything, and his initial attraction to Craig was based entirely on mutual apathy.  Together they had felt cold and hard and invincible, and Stan had loved that about them at the time, loved someone who made him feel okay for not caring, like he wasn’t alone.  But around eighteen first cocaine, and then heroin made the glamorous, sweeping entrances back into his life and a year later he found himself sitting with Craig in that stupid walk-in clinic waiting to get tested, and then he was all alone again for a very long time.

But he doesn’t feel like telling that story tonight.  

“You can quote me on it,” he says instead, giving Kyle’s hand a stoned little kiss, before pushing away on his heels and rolling back over to the wall of photos.  He grabs one of Kyle wearing a crown of thorns and an old bedsheet cape.  “Now tell me about this one.”

Kyle does, and then they smoke another small bowl together, and just as Stan is starting to feel unsettled by how quiet the house is, thinking maybe he should leave, Kyle pulls out his beat-up laptop again and says, “Okay, since you’re still here you _have_ to at least _try_ to watch Royal Tenenbaums.”

Stan crawls onto Kyle’s bed while Kyle pulls up the video.  He stays awake through most of it, although Kyle falls asleep in the first ten minutes.  It’s about as pretentious and quirky as he expected, and he can see why Craig hates it and Kyle loves it.  Richie Tenenbaum resonates with him a little too much, but so does Eli, and he’s glad Kyle isn’t awake to see him get misty-eyed when Buckley dies.  

He starts to nod off near the end though, and suddenly the computer screen is black, but the lamp is still on and Kyle is leaning over his body to turn it off before spooning him from behind.  Stan squirms a little, settling into the warmth of him, and he can hear Kyle laughs softly into his hair, his beard tickling the back of Stan’s neck.

“You don’t have to sleep in a suit jacket if you don’t want to.”

Stan nods, head feeling murky and swamp-like, and he twists out of the jacket without actually getting up and kicks off the pants so he’s just in his polo and boxers.  He can hear Kyle do the same behind him, and then they’re pressed together again with just thin layers of cotton between them, Kyle’s knees fitting perfectly at the back his own.

“Do you ever wonder what it would be like if I had come back,” Kyle asks quietly, one arm circling right below Stan’s ribs.  “If my parents had changed their minds, and they let me come back.”

Stan thinks about it all the time.  Maybe they would have stopped being friends in middle school, or high school.  Maybe they would be friends, but only peripherally, nodding hello over a red solo cup at a party, just lonely satellites orbiting each other.  Or maybe they would have started fooling around at age fourteen, fumbling through terrible handjobs, then blowjobs, sharing each other’s firsts, because deep down Stan knows Kyle could have loved him, would have if they’d been given the chance.  Maybe they would have gone to prom together in ill-fitting tuxes, or Stan would have embarrassed Kyle by insisting on wearing a Broncos jersey.  Maybe Stan would have been starting quarterback for their high school football team, and maybe Kyle would have come to every game.  Maybe they would have gone to college together and would have lived together, and everyone would know them for fighting like an old married couple.  Maybe Kyle would always have to do the dishes, and Stan would always have to do the laundry, and they would resent each other because of the little things.  Maybe Kyle would still have pictures of Javier pinned to his wall, covering up old photos of Stan.  Or maybe Stan would be able to fight for a relationship, would know how to be strong without scraping his way out of the bowels of addiction.  Maybe they would be naked in bed now instead, Stan playing a song for Kyle on an acoustic guitar that the rest of the world would never hear.  Maybe they would be normal, and together, and alright.

“Yeah,” Stan says, his voice coarse with smoke and sleep.  “Of course I do, Kyle.”

Kyle hums in response, but he doesn’t do or say anything else.  Stan, exhausted, falls asleep soon after.

 

 


	2. march.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> JESUS CHRIST THIS IS LONG WHAT HAPPENED. third and final chapter should be up within the next week, fingers crossed.

The next morning should be awkward, but it isn’t.  Kyle’s roommate barges in around eleven freaking out that they’re going to be late for brunch, because the wait at both Screen Door and Broder is over an hour on Saturdays, and that’s what they promised would be their treat to each other after the party.  She isn’t even phased by Stan, still curled in Kyle’s arms.  

“You wanna get brunch?” Kyle asks wetly against Stan’s neck. Stan _wants_ to stay like this for another thirteen hours, but he is also starving for something that isn’t leftover cake and has to piss and will away his stupid morning wood.

“If we have to,” he says, before groping around on the floor where he dropped his jacket and pants last night.

Kyle laughs at him for trying to leave the house still dressed like Richie Tenenbaum and lends him a pair of skinny jeans that are uncomfortable everywhere and a macro-striped, aquamarine and neon-pink sweater that was clearly manufactured for women no later than 1993.  Stan drives Kyle, and his roommate, and his roommate’s boyfriend, and two girls that slept on the couches downstairs last night to Broder, and everyone has to comment on the fact that his SUV isn’t a hybrid.  

It feels good to be teased.  Stupid, but good.  Kyle buys him coffee while they wait the hour-and-a-half in line outside.  Everyone stands close together in the dry, late winter cold, hands in pockets and elbows touching each other’s stomachs, making small talk about classes and debating shit Stan never even thinks about, like fluoride in public water, or how big garbage cans should legally be.  The only time Stan’s ever cared about any of what everyone else is so passionate about is when he thought it would bring his friend back, and it never did.  

Their company is nice, and fun, and exhilarating.  Everyone in South Park treats Stan with weary resignation, even his friends.  Stan spends the thirty minutes that they wait for food at the table thinking this could be his life, these could be his people, and aches for it until Kyle kicks him in the shin.  

Things only get weird when Stan drops everyone back off at the house.  Kyle and his roommate are trying to rope the others into helping clean up, but Kyle is firm about letting Stan go.  So the others climb out of the car obligingly and Kyle stays in the passenger seat with his seatbelt still buckled, waiting to say goodbye.

“So, May,” Stan says awkwardly.  

“Yeah,” Kyle agrees, sighing like the wind’s been knocked out of him.  “It seems far away, even if it’s not.  I can’t believe we’re still doing this.”

“It’s going to be awesome,” Stan says, but he means, is it going to be awesome?  Am I really not going to see you until May?  Am I never going to see you again after that?  “Just uh, send me the schedule when it gets closer.  I know you’re going to be super busy, graduating and all that shit, but.”

“I will,” Kyle says.  “I like to think I’m at my most capable when I’m super stressed out.”

“Awesome,” Stan says again, because he can’t stop saying it, he doesn’t know what else to say.  He laughs weakly.

“I honestly can’t wait.  This is gonna be the light at the end of the tunnel for me.  Usually the whole thing is just as stressful as finals, but now I’m just,” Kyle pauses.  “I feel relieved, I guess.  I’m so stoked you’re gonna be there, I’m stoked I get to see you perform.  I’m so happy you came out here.  I’m sorry if it got weird--”

“It didn’t get weird,” Stan says.  “I had a great time.  It was so good to see you.”

Kyle smiles at him, blinding, radiant.  It feels so comforting to be swallowed up in his affection, Stan thinks, I want this all the time.  

“You too.  Keep in touch, okay?”

Stan nods.  “Yeah.”

And then Kyle is unbuckling his seatbelt and climbing out of the car and back up toward his house.  Stan can only watch him go with his heart beating wildly in his chest, _no no no no_ , wanting so very much.

He goes back to his hotel and sleeps for another six hours, and by then it’s night and he lays in bed and sleeps for another four with the TV on the entire time.  At five in the morning he impulsively decides it’s time to drive back to South Park.  The drive is much slower, much less manic this time around.  When Stan had initially envisioned this trip, he had thought it might be nice to have the leisurely drive back, but now he just feels trapped, and he rapidly loses his ability to focus on the road.  His mind is overwhelmed with stupid, trivial questions; did it mean anything, should he text Kyle when he gets home, should he text Kyle now, should he drive back to Portland and ask Kyle if he can just stay forever?  Worse than that, he wants to make the questions and the feelings disappear more than he wants to entertain them, and about the time he hits Boise he feels sick and shaky with need.

He calls Craig from the parking lot of a Holiday Inn Express.  It picks up on the third ring.

“Are you back in South Park?” Craig asks.  He never says hello, and Stan has always been fond of his complete inability to bullshit.  

“No,” Stan croaks out.  “Boise.  I can’t do this.”

“Fuck, Stan.”

“I’m just crashing,” Stan says, and it comes out calm, but he feels hysterical.  “I don’t know if I can get back on the road.”

“Jesus.”  Craig sighs, and is quiet for a few beats.  “I’m back at school already.  I’m working on a deadline.”

“I’ll pay for your ticket,” Stan says.  “I just need the company for the ride back.”

Craig remains quiet for a few more seconds, and Stan can tell it’s an angry quiet.  He almost expects Craig to just hang up, but then Craig says, “Okay.  Fine.  Text me a departure time and get a hotel room.  I want you to stay where you are and fuck, I don’t know, watch Food Network until I get there.”

“Okay,” Stan agrees.

“I’m so mad at you,” Craig tells him, and then he hangs up.  

Stan gets a room at the Holiday Inn and eight hours later there’s a knock on the door.  Craig looks all sorts of furious when Stan opens it, and Stan expects to be called several terrible things, expects Craig to take one look at him and leave.

“What the fuck are you wearing?” Craig asks instead, and Stan looks down to see he’s still wearing the horrible clothes Kyle gave him yesterday.  “It looks like Portland threw up all over you.”

Stan falls into Craig’s arms, and Craig lets him, lets Stan bury his head in the space between his neck and shoulder and cry and apologize over and over again without saying anything, and it’s one of the reasons he still loves Craig so much.  Eventually when he quiets down and is just sniffling, Craig puts a hand on his back and soothingly rubs at the space between his shoulder blades with his thumb.

“You ready to go?” Craig asks, and Stan nods in return.  Craig holds his hand all the way back to the car and immediately puts his other hand out for the keys, which Stan wordlessly gives him.  

“You look good,” Stan says, when they’re back on the road.  He hasn’t seen Craig in a few weeks with Craig spending his winter break in Denver working overtime on the final project he’s screening in a few months.  

“Thanks,” Craig says dryly.  “Want to hear what I’ve been doing?”

Stan does, so Craig tells him, talks about how his project has been going, all the complicated drama that accompanies his senior year in film school, having to corral others and continue petitioning for funding for what he claims is going to be a grand masterpiece.  It’s fascinating, and Craig is a funny storyteller in a compelling, abstract way that will one day make him sought after and famous.  He doesn’t ask about Stan’s time in Portland, or about Kyle, just drawls on and on about his project and the stupid people he has to compromise with to make it a reality.  They pull over multiple times for gas, for snacks, for much-needed coffee, but Craig never lets Stan drive, and Stan ends up sleeping a good portion of the drive.  They’re back in South Park the next afternoon.

“Do you want to come in?  Maybe take a nap before you head back to Denver?” Stan suggests when they’re sitting in the circle drive in front of the McMansion he bought at age fourteen.  It’s next to Token’s parents’ house, in the remnants of a partially developed neighborhood leftover from the brief period where celebrities were buying second homes in South Park.  

Craig takes his keys out of the ignition and hands them to Stan before following him inside.  

The house came pre-furnished, and it’s still the only reason Stan has any furniture at all outside of his entertainment set-up.  There are a few small, homey remnants from when Stan’s mother and sister lived here after he first bought it; Shelly still has her own room upstairs whenever she comes back home for the holidays, and the bowl that Stan throws his keys in was put there by Sharon when Stan officially got his driver’s permit, even though Randy had started teaching him how to drive at age nine when he was too drunk to get them both home.

“Stan,” Craig says when Stan won’t stop touching the bowl, has maybe stood there looking at it for over a minute.  He grabs Stan’s hand gently and tugs him away.  They leave his duffel bag at the foot of the staircase, and Craig guides Stan up and through the hallways to the master suite where he slept almost every night with Stan when they were eighteen.  Craig gives the bed a dirty stare when he notices the tousled, unmade sheets from days ago.  “Someday, we are going to have a talk about you finally learning to make your bed.”

Stan gives him a small smile.  They both know this is where he used to say, that’s why I keep you around.  

Even though Stan’s spent the last two days sleeping off and on, he strips down to his boxers with Craig and slips under the messy sheets with him.  They instinctively huddle together, Craig on his back with Stan’s head on his chest, limbs twisted around him like a car wreck around a tree.

“You’re paying for the cab back to Denver,” Craig says.  His eyes are already closed.

“Duh,” Stan replies, hooking his foot under Craig’s ankle.

“This probably shouldn’t happen again.”  Craig blindly brings his hand up to comb through Stan’s hair, stubby fingernails rough against the nape of his neck.

“Yeah,” Stan agrees.  “Sorry.  It’s a process.  I’m getting better.”

“I know,” Craig says.  His voice is getting slurred by sleep, and his hand is going limp.  “I know.”

Stan has lied to himself about last times more times than he can count.  This is the last one, he had said as a child shoving a handful of M&Ms into his mouth.  This is the last time, he told himself crushing the last of a rock with a credit card alone in his hotel room.  This is the last fucking time you do this to me, Craig had screamed at him when he found him walking down Lincoln Ave in the snow without shoes or a coat.  This is the last time, Craig had kissed into his sweaty back last Thanksgiving when he fucked Stan on the floor of his childhood bedroom hard enough that Stan got rug burn on his cheeks.  This is the last time, Craig had said seriously every time they fucked before that in the past six months.

Stan’s entire life is determined by the amount of times he’s told himself that he wouldn’t do something again and the ensuing failure.  Still, it’s nice that Craig believes that this is the last time, that Stan won’t rope him into caretaking again, that Stan will never pleadingly press his boner into Craig’s thigh again like he’s doing right now.

They don’t have sex, which is a disappointing considering how persistent Stan’s erection is.  Craig sleeps for four hours, snores a little and drools a lot.  Stan eventually goes into the bathroom to jerk off.  He starts off thinking about Craig, then Kyle, then a faceless nobody so he feels less guilty.  When he comes he’s mostly frustrated about it.  His libido has been exhausting him since he got clean again.  On coke he had always liked sex, but could never actually get off and would spend hours getting fucked and jerking off until he was raw and hurt everywhere.  When he had been abusing painkillers he lost any desire for sex at all, and Craig would glare up at him with Stan’s soft dick in his mouth like he was taking it personally.  

He crawls back in bed and retangles himself with Craig after jerking off, and turns on the TV he has mounted against the wall.  Food Network is back on when Craig wakes up again, and Craig sneers at it blearily before pawing at Stan’s face to kiss him.  It’s the best kind of kiss, sloppy and wet, Craig cradling his head like if he could hold the slow moment in his hands forever he would.  Stan thinks, _finally_ , and lets his hands start to wander lower, until Craig kisses him on the forehead and asks him to call a cab instead.  While Stan obliges, Craig gets dressed behind him.  

“Is there anything I should worry about?” Craig asks him seriously when the cab pulls up to the property gate.  He zips up his jacket.  “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” Stan replies.  He’s still in his boxers, even though they’re back in the foyer where it’s chilly.  “I’m sorry I scared you like that.”

Craig doesn’t say anything else, just nods to himself and pats at his pocket for wallet, keys, phone.  Before he leaves he kisses Stan one more time, first on the forehead, and then dry and chaste on the mouth.  When Stan closes the door behind him it feels like a last time.  It feels like a conclusion.

x

Stan spends the rest of his afternoon fucking around into a mic in the studio he had constructed in his backyard last spring.  He’s still feeling a little drained and embarrassed, not sure if he should text Kenny or Token about playing together in a few months, or fuck, even Kyle to tell him that he made it home safely.  Instead he just throws his residual anxiety into his work and pretends the world outside of his small studio and all the people in it have faded away.  

Kenny shows up a few hours after Craig leaves, completely ruining the fantasy.  He’s got bleach stains on his black work clothes and a greasy bag under his arm, and he looks absolutely furious.

“I was really mad that Craig made me break in here after I hosted a test kitchen you were on the reservation list for because he thought you were dead,” Kenny says, throwing the bag to Stan, who is sitting on a beat-up leather sofa with a laptop open on his thighs.  “I thought you were dead too, by the way.”

“Sorry?” Stan says, looking inside the bag.  It’s a pulled pork behemoth that Kenny usually charges fifteen dollars for.  “You can’t expect me to learn my lesson if you keep bringing me food.”

“That's from Lisa, who is a much better person than I am,” Kenny says.  Lisa is Kenny’s former boss at the bar he now co-owns, and also his current wife.  She’s over a decade older than the two of them, and Stan tries to not be too judgemental, because Lisa is nice, and hot, and means well, and Stan had also taken his fair share of Hollywood Records producer dick before he could legally drive.  

“Thanks Lisa,” Stan mumbles, taking a big bite out of the sandwich. “Oh fuck,” he tries to say, because it’s incredible, but it comes out more like “ohfuhhhh.”

“So, how’s Kyle?” Kenny asks, and Stan shrugs, because it would figure that Craig had already told him.

“Good,” he says between bites.  “Really good.”

“Because I mean, the last time we saw Kyle he was a pixelated sack of meat tripping balls, so you can see how I might be concerned.”

Stan nods, but he’s pointing at the sandwich like it cured cancer.  There are pickled eggs and onion spilling out the side with some kind of mystery sauce.   “Dude,” he says between bites, “I always think it’s not gonna be as good as I remember it, but then it is! How the fuck did you come up with this.”

“Poor kids gotta get creative in the kitchen,” Kenny replies, and then he’s pulling the messy bag out of Stan’s fingers.  Stan makes grabby hands for it, but Kenny puts a hand on his chest, and Stan realizes that Kenny fully intended to use the sandwich as a bargaining chip for information.  Worse than that, it’s totally working.  “Focus, Marsh.  You can see why I’m concerned after hearing that my two childhood friends with substance abuse problems decided to have an impromptu playdate three states away.”

“I know,” Stan whines, bouncing in his seat for the bag that Kenny is holding over his head.  “It was stupid, I’m sorry.”

“I just want to make sure you weren’t doing anything stupid,” Kenny says.  “Were you doing anything stupid, Stanley?”

“No, Jesus!” Stan says, making a pathetic swipe for the sandwich.  He misses.  “Kyle works for his college radio station, and he wanted to see if I was interested in playing a show.  I got carried away.  I was excited.  I was going to tell you.”

“You kind of had to,” Kenny says, and Stan thinks he’s never going to give back the sandwich until he does.  “I’m your fucking drummer.”

“You _are_ ,” Stan reaffirms, pulling a stringy piece of pork out and greedily stuffing it into his mouth.  “You are and I told him, you know, conditionally yes I would like to play a show, and I would like it to be your desert thing, but I have to talk to the guys.  I said that!  But think, Kenny, aren’t you curious?  Haven’t you had a voice at the back of your head, wondering?  Wondering if he was okay?  Don’t you want to see him?”

“Not with any sort of urgency that would make me bail on a weekend’s worth of social obligations and drive across the country like a crazy person.”  Stan scowls at him, and he shrugs. “Sorry, but that is really questionable behavior.  Like, not even a plane, dude?”

“I wasn’t thinking,” Stan repeats.

“Yeah, obviously, I’m just.”  Kenny bites the inside of his cheek, watching Stan continue to demolish the sandwich. “We were all concerned.  It sounds like something you would do, because you were, you know.”

He taps the side of his nose.  Stan sighs, nods.

“It felt like that,” he admits.  “It felt like I was.  Just, that spontaneous need, that spike of energy.  I crashed on the way back.  It was bad.  I made Craig fly out to Boise and drive me the rest of the way back.”

“I know.  We put Craig on Stan Watch 2015 and made him report back to all of us.  He was super pissed.  It’s kind of unfair to ask so much of him, don’t you think?”

“Did you just come here to make me feel bad?” Stan asks. “Because, listen, I get that what I did was irresponsible, and I don’t have a great track record.  But I’m an adult, man.”

“With friends, _man_ ,” Kenny doesn’t spit the word back at him, but it’s a close thing.  “Who care about you and get worried when you do stupid shit, like disappear from town without telling anyone.  We have every right to think you’re out there doing something stupid, or hurting yourself.”

“I know, I know,” Stan persists.  “But it was _Kyle_ \--”

“Who I haven’t seen since I was nine years old!  Look, I’ve done the long lost friend reunion routine, okay?  I get it, and that’s why it’s hard to stay mad at you.  You weren’t doing anything bad.  Just give your friends a little head’s up next time.”

Stan chews his sandwich slowly and doesn’t say anything else.  The food in his mouth has begun to taste like sand.  He looks down at the fatty meat and pickled egg yolk and his stomach churns, and he misses using.

“I get it,” he says.  “I’m sorry I scared you.”

“You should be more sorry you missed test kitchen,” Kenny replies.  “The theme was breakfast for dinner in the French countryside.”

“Of course it was,” Stan says.  “Adulthood has made you so bougie.”

“Continue biting the hand that feeds you, kid,” Kenny says, reaching out to thumb away some wayward sauce off Stan’s face and then slapping him lightly on the cheek, before sitting down on the arm of the couch next to him.  “So are you going to tell me about this show we’re apparently playing?”

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” Stan says.  It is a lot, because Kenny already spent his limited free time last year here recording and re-recording and re-re-re-recording drum tracks on the same shitty kit he had in high school for Stan’s EP.  It is, because after getting out of rehab Kenny would spend hours sitting with his feet pressed sole-to-sole with Stan’s on the same beat-up leather couch he’s sitting in now, playing guitar until his fingers bled.  It is, because Kenny is still always bringing Stan leftovers from work to make sure Stan doesn’t starve.  It is, because asking anything from Kenny is a lot at this point.

“You’ve asked me to do a lot worse,” Kenny says, because he’s also seen Stan on the mattress in his parent’s living room with a needle in his arm, has been asked by Stan to not tell anyone, to just leave him alone, to scratch the back of his neck because he was too high to do it himself.  

“Yeah,” Stan agrees.  

“And it’s okay,” Kenny says, “It’s okay, and I forgive you, even when you do stupid, crazy shit like drive to Oregon without telling anyone you’re leaving.  And I would actually really like to hear about what you were doing there.”

“Right, Oregon,” Stan says, and something in his chest loosens a little bit thinking about it.  He tucks the last of the sandwich into his mouth with his fingers and then wipes his hands against his shirt to clean the grease off before returning to his laptop and googling the KRRC website.  “Our childhood friend, little Kyle Broflovski, is in Oregon and is now a senior at Reed College, where he’s also the director of their radio program.”

“Nerd,” Kenny says fondly.

“At the end of every academic year they throw this big party in the Oregon desert, which is apparently a thing.  They usually get a few local bands to come play, but it’s funded pretty dismally through the radio station, so it sounds like a real collaborative effort to get everyone set up in a single place.  After Mountain Towns made a few waves at their station, Kyle decided to get a hold of me through our moms to see if I would be interested in playing a show for a reasonable rate.”

“Okay,” Kenny says.

“It’s May twenty-sixth, if you need more time,” Stan says.  “But what do you think?”

“I just said ‘okay,’” Kenny replies, leaning over Stan to scroll up and down on the KRRC website.  “I’m in.  Let’s do this.”

“Wait, seriously?”  

“It’s Kyle, man, of course I want to see that kid again,” Kenny says, and then he pauses, sits back firmly on the arm of the couch again like he’s considering something heavily.  “And, okay.  I have some big news.  Like, huge actually, that I was gonna tell you this weekend, but I think this makes it more exciting.”

“What?” Stan asks, spinning around to face him.  Kenny looks like he’s fighting off the urge to smile and is failing miserably, both corners of his mouth stretching about as wide as his skinny face will allow.

“I need to do as much cool, adventurous shit that I can,” Kenny says, hesitating again for effect, “before I become a dad.”

“Before you--wait, _what_? Stan repeats.  “You’re gonna be a dad?”

“Lisa just got through her first trimester, so I’m officially allowed to tell people,” Kenny says, arms folding over his chest as if to hide his pride.  “I’m gonna be a dad, Stan.”

“ _What_ ,” Stan says again, the vowels dripping out of his mouth he’s slobbering.  “Like, that’s.  That’s huge.  That’s a really big deal.  You’re--aren’t you kinda young, dude?  You’re only twenty-two.”

“Yeah, and Lisa is like thirty-four, we’re working with the time we’ve got,” Kenny says.  “And I mean, we’re both stable.  We’ve got the bar, which is doing well, and I’ve got years of practice taking care of you.  A baby should be peanuts in comparison, right?”

“Right,” Stan echoes.  “Holy shit, dude.  Congratulations.  I--I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do without you there to take care of me all the time.”

“Gotta take those training wheels off sometime,” Kenny says, before hiding his face in the palm of his hand.  “God, I sound like such a fucking dad already.”

“You really do,” Stan says.  “Like you said, years of practice.”

“So I mean, six months,” Kenny says.  “Four or five realistically, because I’ll be doing more work at the bar when she inevitably can’t.  After that I don’t know when I’ll have the chance to jump in a van with you and play a concert in the desert, or how often I’ll even be able to come over and fuck around.”

Kenny’s voice cracks a little at the end, and he keeps his mouth muffled in his palm as he stares at Stan earnestly, as if he’s saying _please_ , like he’s asking for permission.  Stan nods dumbly.  He can’t stop thinking about the last two years he’s had with Kenny, the slow recovery, the hours and days since he built his studio that Kenny has spent helping him make music and keep him on track.  The entire recording process had gone against everything Stan had learned from fumbling around a professional studio in his younger years, using a mediocre drummer on a shitty kit, but Stan was still more proud of the product than anything of his that ever went platinum, was still happier listening to Kenny play like they were still seventeen in someone’s basement.  It’s hard to think he won’t have that anymore.

“Okay,” Stan says, a little numb.  “Four or five months.  We’ve got this.  We’re going to play as much music as we can.  We’re going to go play a concert in the desert.  I’m going to finish my album, eventually.  You’re going to have a baby.”

Kenny recognizes what Stan’s doing and kicks him in the shin.  “We’re going to be fine.  You’ll see me all the time.  You’ll be more of an uncle than Kevin ever will and I’ll probably make you babysit on weekends if you can learn to make a goddamn sandwich by yourself.”

Stan laughs, because the only alternative is crying.  “You’re right.  God.  This is crazy.”

“Be happy for me?” Kenny gently pleads.

“Of course,” Stan says, leaning back and looking at the ceiling when he says it instead of at Kenny.  “God.”

Kenny pats him on the shoulder a few times and leans over him again to look back at the website.  They’re quiet for a few minutes, while Stan takes it in and Kenny clicks on different things on the screen.  “Hey,” he says eventually, “they have a DJ schedule.”

Stan grunts, and hooks his chin over Kenny’s arm to see whatever Kenny is clicking on.  

“Dude, Kyle’s got a show in an hour.  Let’s see if we can stream it,” Kenny says excitedly, and it’s enough to distract Stan from having a complete meltdown.  They spend the next five minutes trying to figure out how to stream the radio station and plugging Stan’s laptop into his good speakers, and suddenly they have shitty lo-fi blaring loud enough to rattle the foundation.

“Shit!” Stan says, hands over his ears, scrambling to turn it down.  “I don’t know if I can endure an hour of this.”

“No, I wanna hear Kyle’s voice,” Kenny says.  “Is it still squeaky?”

“It’s not,” Stan says, leaning back in his chair.  “I forgot to tell you!  He’s like, this super regal lumberjack king.  It’s so weird.  I wasn’t ready for it.  He’s like, tall and skinny, but he’s got this really well-maintained orange forest for a beard growing on his face.”

“You’re fucking with me,” Kenny says.

“I’m not!  And he’s got total NPR voice, like these soothing, dulcet, commanding tones.  It’s really weird.”

“You wanna bone him,” Kenny decides after a few seconds, and then watches as Stan tries to fight down a blush.

“Yeah?” Stan says eventually.  “Maybe?  We kind of cuddled at his house.  I don’t fucking know.  Should I not want to bone my childhood best friend?  Is that weird?”

“Well, think about it,” Kenny says, “if you had grown up together, what would have happened?”

“I think about it _all the time_ ,” Stan groans.  “I would’ve been--I mean, I am interested.  I guess.  But he seemed sort of reserved?  Like, it was like he was some sort of hired talent assistant who was supposed to cart me around, but not get too close.  But then we got high and slept in his bed together.”

“You got high?  Jesus Christ, Stan.”

“Wrong thing to take away from the conversation.”  Stan frowns at him.

“What about Craig?  Haven’t you guys sort of,” Kenny trails off and makes a gesture with his fingers that Stan assumes means ‘buttfucking’.  Stan flips him off.

“Before this weekend I hadn’t seen Craig since like, the start of December,” Stan says.  “We didn’t even have sex when he dropped me off.  People seem to have finally gotten the message that my dick comes with a lot of baggage.”

“Thank fucking Christ,” Kenny says.  Stan’s face scrunches up more and Kenny shrugs. “You and Craig are the absolute worst together.  You just become unfunny assholes who have sex and fight and talk about how everything sucks all the time.”

“That’s not true,” Stan says, even if it absolutely is.  Kenny spends the next forty-five minutes reminding him why, recounting all of the times that he and Craig had screaming matches on the front lawn so loud that the Blacks called the cops on them.  Kenny’s laughing his ass off about the hate-fuck anthem that Stan wrote for and showed up at Park County High to serenade Craig with in his senior year, when the KRRC bumper that leads into Kyle’s show starts.

“Ssssh!” Stan says, smacking Kenny a few times, and Kenny instantly turns the volume up to it’s earlier setting.

“I’m so excited!” he says over the blaring guitar of Kyle’s intro, and then--

“ _Hey, thanks for tuning in, you’re listening to 97.9FM KRRC, and this is your host for the next two hours, Kyle Broflovski._ ”

“What the fuck,” Kenny whispers to Stan.  “That’s Kyle?”

“ _I’ve got a lot of good indie jams slated, some War on Drugs and EMA, as well as a chance to win tickets to an upcoming Whirr show.  Just wanted to send a quick shout-out to everyone who came to the radio station birthday party last weekend.  It was a big success, and my house is thoroughly trashed.  It’s you filthy animals that keep this radio station alive, so thanks again.  As always, if you have any requests, just give us a call at the station at 503-555-4551.  Now, an oldie but a goodie in hipster years I’ve been listening to a lot lately: Daydream, by Youth Lagoon.  Enjoy, and remember to keep it locked here on KRRC_.”

As Kyle’s voice fades into a vibrant synth rhythm, Kenny turns to Stan and clutches his shoulders.

“We have to call and make a request.”

“What!” Stan says, putting his hands up.  “No way!”

“We’re doing it,” Kenny says, sliding his phone out of his pocket.  “What was the number? Five-oh-three-what?”

Stan begrudgingly reads it off of the station’s website, knowing he’ll just get shoved aside if he doesn’t.  Kenny bites his bottom lip and puts the phone on speaker when it starts dialing.  

“Turn it down!” he mouths, and Stan flips him off again but does so anyway.

“ _Hey, this is Kyle at KRRC_ ,” Kyle answers the phone almost immediately, and Kenny makes an unearthly squeal at the back of his throat.  “ _Uh, hello_?”

Kenny coughs and gives Stan a serious look.  Stan shakes his head and waves his arms like, _no, no no no_.  And Kenny lowers his voice to comedic proportions when he says, “Uh, yes, hello.  I am a Reed student.”

“ _Uh_ ,” Kyle drawls.  “ _Okay_?”

“Yes,” Kenny says, and he is _so bad at this_ , and Stan has his head in his hands.  “And I would like to request a song, please.”

“ _What would you like to hear_?” Kyle asks.

“Can you play something off the new Stan Marsh EP?” Kenny asks.  Stan punches him in the arm, and he just laughs into it.  “Maybe uh that track, ‘Park Bench.’  I really like the drums on that one.”

“ _Dude, sorry.  I’ve put in place a strict no-Stan Marsh policy_ ,” Kyle says, and Stan can’t stop himself.

“What?” he manfully shrieks. “What the fuck, Kyle?”

“ _Wait, who is this_?”

Kenny is laughing his ass off.  “It’s Kenny!  From South Park!  Stan’s here with me, say ‘hi,’ Stan!”

Stan groans, wiping at his eyes with the heels of his hands miserably.

“ _Kenny?  Like, McCormick?  And Stan?  Oh fuck. Stan, it’s seriously--they were playing your music too much, every show was turning into the Stan Marsh five-track variety hour_.”

“It’s cool,” Stan groans from behind his fingers.  “I totally get it.”

“ _No, oh no, fuck, I totally sound like such an asshole right now.  Why are you listening to my show_?”

“It was Kenny’s idea,” Stan says mopily.

“It was,” Kenny agrees.  “Stan was telling me about this show we’re supposed to be playing for your radio station and I was like, gotta see if his source is legit.”

“ _Wait, you’re coming up with Stan_?”

“Well, we _were_ going to come up,” Kenny says, and then Stan hits him again in the stomach hard enough to make him wheeze.  

“We are,” Stan says.  “Kenny’s been playing drums with me since high school.  He’s just being a dick.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Kyle says, pausing.  “ _So you’re still coming, right_?”

“If you’ll still have me, uh, I mean us.  If you’ll still have us,” Stan says, absolutely mortified by everything coming out of his mouth.  “I mean, if you have a strict no-Stan Marsh policy, I don’t know if I can get around that.”

“ _They were playing your music too much, dude! It was like Taylor Swift all up in here!_ ” Kyle responds, voice getting pitchy and frustrated, and Kenny laughs weakly from where he’s still clutching his stomach.  “ _I’ll lift the ban in like a month or whenever you have new music out, whichever comes first_.”

“That,” Kenny coughs, “that sounds like a challenge, dude!”

“Shut up, Kenny,” Stan says.

“ _It was.  Stan, make more music so I can play new stuff on the radio._ ”

“I’m working on it!” Stan says.  “We’re calling you from my home studio.  I’m going to make Kenny lay a few tracks for me now until his arms fall off.”

“Please don’t,” Kenny says.  

“ _Hey, I have another call coming in, but uh.  Thanks for listening to my show, guys!  This was really cool.  I’ll see if I can’t get around my own ban somehow.  I’m gonna let you go now_.”

“See you in May!” Kenny says cheerfully, while Stan lets out a more mournful, “bye.”

The call ends as the track starts fading into something different, and Stan hits his head against the wall, feeling like an idiot.  Kenny ruffles his hair a little too aggressively.  

“You know, suddenly I’m a little happy you’re not going to be around as often,” Stan says.

“Hey!” Kenny says, perching next to him again.  “That was fun and you know it.  You were right about the NPR voice too, holy shit.  Who knew Broflovski had it in him?”

“Right?” Stan says, sitting up rapidly again.  “Right?  It’s weird, right?”

“Right,” Kenny agrees.

Stan’s phone buzzes in his pocket and he whips it out.  Kenny reads over his shoulder and makes a contemplative _hmmm_ sound when he finishes it.

**Kyle B.**

_that was another caller requesting a Stan Marsh track i hope you fuckers know.  i think i found something everyone will enjoy, so keep tuned_

“That sounds ominous,” Kenny says. “Also, _Kyle B._ , you’re adorable.”

“Shut up,” Stan says, reading the text message over and over again.  He’s texted Kyle a few times over the past few days, but it usually takes Kyle a few hours to respond, and Stan’s kind of let it go.

When the second song ends, it fades back into Kyle’s voice, who welcomes listeners back to the station and recaps the two tracks.  “ _While you were listening, we got two calls for song requests at the station.  Both of them being songs from the Mountain Towns EP released last December by Stan Marsh, who has apparently single-handedly taken control of the minds and hearts of all our listeners.  Due to overwhelming radio play we are temporarily limiting the amount of Mountain Towns that we’re playing here at KRRC.  However, just this time only, I am going to give into the requests of both listeners by dusting off my copy of Stan Marsh’s 2005 platinum album ‘TOOLSHED’ and playing the first single, which I’m sure everyone remembers.  Thanks again for calling listeners, and also, you’re welcome._ ”

“No, turn it off, turn it off!” Stan wails, reaching for the volume again, but Kenny tackles him.  “I’m going to murder you if you don’t get off of me, Kenny!”

“Try me,” Kenny says, and proceeds to lay on him for the entire song, singing along poorly with the chorus.  Stan wriggles unhappily beneath him.  “You’re gonna miss this so much.”

The song is awful, from a period when Stan’s voice was just beginning to change, and they had to edit the shit out of it when they were recording.  On tour they just had him sing over tracks, mixed his voice with someone a little bit older and more talented.  At that point he had lost all creative control, was starting to hear rumors of the next big thing that was going to render him irrelevant.  

“Bebe let me get to second base with her when this song was playing at a school dance in the seventh grade,” Kenny says wistfully, still holding Stan down while the song blares overhead.

“Kenny, gross, you suck,” Stan groans, even though he prefers Kenny’s stories to his own.

When the song ends Kenny finally lets him go.  Stan scrambles to his phone and sends Kyle a furious text that says _kenny held me down and made me listen to that whole thing it was awful_.  Kyle sends one back that says _serves you right :p do u know the countless bar mitzvahs i struggled thru listening to that_.  Stan laughs a little.

“So it’s funny when he says it,” Kenny says, reading over his shoulder.  

“It’s funny when you don’t involve Bebe Steven’s boobs,” Stan replies, and sends back a _whatever can i do to make it up to you?_  He hopes it sounds suggestive.  The only people he’s ever been able to net flirting have been twice his age, or Craig, so.  He’s not incredibly optimistic.

Kenny only stays for the first hour of the show, eventually leaving with an eyeroll when he realizes he has five missed calls from Lisa.  Stan listlessly waves goodbye, more concerned with texting Kyle _who is this i like it_.  Immediately he gets the response _if youd just listen for five minutes ill tell you_.  When the show is over he writes _that was good, do you do that show every week_? And Kyle writes _every monday & wednesday :) did i just get a new listener?_

Stan is pleasantly surprised when Kyle starts texting him on a regular basis.  Kyle will text him stupid things he overhears in the hallway at school, or pictures of new CDs coming in, the innappropriate notes that people will write on recommended track stickers on each cover; on the Mountain Town EP there’s a sticker that has an asterisk next to the track ‘Park Bench’ with a note that says _DO ME ON IT_.  Stan sends him a fifteen second clip of Kenny drumming, a picture of the foot of fresh powder they get on Friday morning with the comment, _when was the last time you saw real snow?_ , and pictures from around South Park when he finally leaves his house to get lunch with his mom.  Kyle always reacts appropriately, writing back _that’s still there?_ or _i would literally murder someone for a slice of shakey’s pizza holy shit_.  

On Saturday afternoon he’s just about to send Kyle a picture of the old park they used to shoot basketballs at when his phone starts buzzing in his hand.  Kyle B. pops up on the caller I.D.

“Are you okay? Are you in trouble?” Stan asks when he answers the phone, thinking something must be wrong if Kyle is calling.  He’s more than a little worried that Kyle will call and ask him not to come after all.   

“ _What? No,_ ” Kyle says on the other end of the line.  “ _Just procrastinating on this paper I’m writing and got bored, so I uh._ ”

He sounds embarrassed, saying it out loud, and Stan smiles to himself.  “Kyle, are you _using a phone as a phone_?”

“ _Call me old-fashioned_ ,” Kyle drawls.  “ _Please tell me your rich-person celebrity life is more exciting than mine is right now._ ”

“Get ready to be disappointed, dude.  I was about to text you a picture of the old park we used to play at, because I am secretly 80 years old,” Stan says.  He’s in his car outside the park, was just driving past and thought it might be nice.  Now he feels kind of creepy.  

“ _Aw,_ ” Kyle says.  “ _That is sort of cute in an old person way.  Are you on your way to eat an early bird special at Bennigan’s_?”

“Haha, fuck you,” Stan says, and he can hear Kyle snickering.  He turns the engine of his car back on and starts to back away from the park.  “I’m driving right now.  Don’t tell anyone.”

“ _I’m selling this story to the tabloids as we speak_ ,” Kyle replies.  “ _What’s that?  Five dollars for a story on Stan Marsh’s reckless driving?  I’ll take it_!”

“You suck,” Stan says. “See if I play your concert now.”

“ _Aw, baby, don’t be that way,_ ” Kyle replies, and it sends shivers up Stan’s spine.  “ _Hey since you’re driving can I tell you the story about how I caught two students fucking in the radio station this morning_?”

“Yes,” Stan hisses like a tire losing air. “Please tell me this story.”

They talk for two hours on the phone, Kyle’s story about the two students leading into horror stories from Stan’s years on tour, the time a girl snuck on his bus and waited for him in his bunk bed, the time Randy caught him blowing one of his dancers at age fifteen and decided to take him to a strip club, and how it had felt like a punishment.  Kyle laughs and groans in all the right places.  They don’t talk about anything too dark, but Stan almost wants to, wants to let Kyle know every inch of him.  It’s a foreign feeling, exhilarating, the weight of his secrets becoming lighter when he shares them with Kyle.  

“Can we do this thing more often?  Is this a thing we can do?” Kyle asks after he tells Stan that he needs to actually get work done so he can go out and get drunk.  

“By this ‘thing’ I assume you mean the talking-on-the-phone-until-we-lose-our-voices thing,” Stan says.

“Yeah,” Kyle responds.  “That thing.  I would like that.”

“Me too,” Stan says, and they do.  Kyle calls him Sunday morning hungover as fuck and ends up throwing up halfway into their phonecall, Stan laughing the entire time.  On Monday Stan calls Kyle after getting no work done in the studio, and they talk until Kyle has to go do his radio show, which Stan listens to in bed.  

Token gets back into town on Thursday, having left for a three-day shoot in the Faeroe Islands.  He is less upset with Stan for his spontaneous Portland trip, mostly because his own life is so hectic he doesn’t have the energy to be mad.  Instead he invites Stan out to brunch and asks about Portland and Kyle like he’s genuinely interested.  When Stan asks if he’d be able to play the desert show in May, Token pulls out his well-maintained schedule, and actually sets aside the time to do it.  

It’s frustrating how well Token handles the pressure of being a public figure and mild celebrity; Token accepts scrutiny and criticism with an effortless grace that Stan has never had.  He doesn’t get on his knees for people, doesn’t crash and burn after week-long raves in Ibiza, doesn’t sell stories about the dozens of beautiful people he’s currently sleeping with.  Stan calls Kyle immediately after brunch to complain about it, to bitch about how Token is flying to Paris in two days for Fashion Week, and how he feels like his friendship is a charity case when Token could be banging Kate Upton instead of fucking around in Stan’s crappy studio.

It’s the first time they talk about Stan’s addiction issues, because Token always omits parts of his stories for Stan, leaves obvious holes where he may have done a few lines at a party in New York, because Token can do things like a few lines and walk away from it without being wholly consumed.  The absences in conversation always linger and haunt Stan, because he  _knows_ , he knows all the things that Token isn't telling him.

“Just, how fucking lucky is he, right?  I wish that was me.  I want that to be me,” he says, pacing back and forth in his studio erratically because he misses cocaine so badly, just aches for it sometimes and that’s part of the problem.  “I wish I could be like Token and not miss it so fucking much, I wish drugs could just like, passively happen to me, and I would have a home to go to at the end of the day away from them, and and and that I could be okay with that.”

“ _Oh Stan_ ,” Kyle says. He sounds very small on the other end of the line.  “ _Are you uh, home right now_?”

“Yeah,” Stan says, rubbing at his face aggressively, hands shaking.  

“ _Okay.  Do you still have Skype?  I just_ ,” Kyle says, speaking slowly, “ _I just feel like I need to see you right now?  Is that weird?_ ”

“Uh,” Stan says, because anyone else and it would be.  He’s not sure if he wants Kyle to see him right now anyway, because he’s a jittery mess.  But he does want to see Kyle.  “Yeah.  Sure.  Let me see if I can remember my password.”

He pulls up Skype on his computer.  He and Kyle had used it when Kyle first moved to San Francisco, but stopped shortly after when Kyle became too listless on acid, and Stan’s career and depression became more prominent.  His username is the same one he had when he was ten.  It takes him a few tries to get the password right, but when he gets it he lets Kyle know.  Within a few seconds, there’s the old, familiar sound of a video chat request coming through.  Stan accepts.

“There you are,” Kyle says, and Stan’s stomach does flips when he sees him.  “Hey you.”

“Hey,” Stan says weakly, laughing a little when he notices that Kyle is wearing a t-shirt that boldly reads RED HAIR DON’T CARE.  “Jesus Christ, you should never be allowed to dress yourself ever again.”

“Hey, this is what loving yourself looks like,” Kyle says back, flipping him off.  “Where are you right now?  It’s so dark.”  

“My studio,” Stan says.  “It’s where I live now.  Want me to show you around?”

“Yeah,” Kyle says, a huge smile on his face.  Stan doesn’t have to ask where Kyle is, can recognize the North California flag hanging on his wall, the pillows encased in flannel behind him the same ones that Stan slept on nearly two weeks ago.  He picks up his laptop and carries it around the studio, showing off his guitar collection, the equipment he’s muddled together over the years, the garbage can overflowing with crumpled sheet music and taco bell wrappers.

“It’s the one place on my property my cleaning lady doesn’t have access to,” Stan explains, “So I don’t think the garbage has ever actually been taken out.”

“Gross, dude,” Kyle laughs, and Stan can see on the screen this time that Kyle pinches his nose when he laughs, squeezes his eyes shut.  “Wait, so is this part of your house?”

Stan explains how he had it converted from a guest house into a recording space after his last attempt at rehab, and it’s separate from the actual house he lives in, which is big and empty and best for sleeping in.  

“I wanna see it anyway.  Give me the full tour,” Kyle demands, so Stan takes the computer outside and shows Kyle his snowed-over pool that has a waterfall in the summer, the covered patio perfect for barbecues that he never has with an expensive grill he doesn’t know how to use.  

“Hi, this is Stan Marsh, and welcome to my Crib,” he says when he opens the sliding glass door into the main house, and he can hear Kyle laugh even though it’s a lame joke.  He walks Kyle through his entertainment room that looks more like a small movie theatre, the living room with high vaulted ceilings and tall white walls that make the space feel colder and emptier than it already is, the lively kitchen that’s been painted orange and yellow and bright blue and has fallen into disuse since his mom moved out, because Stan has never learned how to boil a pot of water on his own.  He peeks the laptop into the other unused rooms in the house before taking it to his bedroom, where they end up finishing their conversation in their respective beds, hundreds of miles away from each other.  Stan’s almost forgotten about how frustrated he was about Token until Kyle brings him up again.

“So you were still waiting to hear from Token about playing the show, right?” Kyle prompts, and Stan remembers _oh, right_ and buries his face into his mattress for a second.

“Yeah,” he says, muffled into the sheets before he lifts his face up.  “He said he’s going to keep his schedule free for that week so we can do it.”

“Awesome.  I didn’t mean to bring it up again, I just wanted to know so I could start making flyers and shit to promote it,” Kyle says.  

“It’s okay,” Stan says, clearly irritated.

“You know, you can tell me if it’s not my place,” Kyle starts a little uncomfortably, “but you have the means to go out and enjoy life the same as he does.  Why don’t you?  I mean, you don’t have to go to big industry events and party, you could just like, travel for you, see things you want to see and fuck what anyone else thinks.”

“My music,” Stan tries to explain, even though he’s been in a creative rut since he released his EP, and Kyle knows this because he’s spent hours bitching about it in their now-daily phone calls.

“Okay, I’m not a professional music critic or anything, but like, Mountain Town was so, so, so South Park.  Just, overwhelmingly.  And maybe you’re having trouble writing new music, because you’ve exhausted that inspiration?  Like, Arcade Fire wrote Reflektor in an abandoned castle in Jamaica.”

“Are you telling me to move to an abandoned castle in Jamaica?”

“No, that’s not what I’m--just, I think you would be happier if you went back into the world on your own terms, and stopped letting South Park suffocate you.”

Stan is silent, torn between telling Kyle he’s out of place and wrong on principle, and accepting that what Kyle is saying is at least somewhat true.  

“Listen, if it was me, and it’s not, but if it was, and if I had the means to leave Portland this second and travel, I would.  I would do it in a second.”

“If you left Portland, you wouldn’t be able to dress like a grandma anymore,” Stan says shyly into the crook of his elbow, trying to sound petulant and failing.  

“First of all, fuck you, my clothes rock,” Kyle says.  “And second of all, no I wouldn’t, because the world doesn’t get to tell me how to live my life.”

“Yeah,” Stan says.  “Yeah, okay.”

“I mean, take that with a grain of salt,” Kyle says. “I’m no fucking expert, and I don’t know where you’ve been, and I won’t pretend to.”

“Thank you,” Stan says, and he means it.  It’s something no one else has ever said to him, because people assume they know him from the stories they’ve read, the things they’ve heard.  Craig once told him, _I don’t give a fuck about what people say about you_ , but that didn’t mean he didn’t believe them.  “Jesus,” he says out loud.  “Where have you been all my life?”

Kyle beams at him when he says it, the same intoxicating, radiant smile that Stan had wanted to drown in when he was in Portland.  

“Definitely not where I was supposed to be,” he says.  “But I like to think we’re working on fixing that.”

x

Stan thinks about what Kyle said, about getting out of South Park and reintroducing himself to the world, and he ends up calling Wendy the next morning.  She’s been getting her undergrad degree at Bryn Mawr and he hasn’t seen her since the last summer she came home, three years ago.  By evening, he has plane tickets to Pennsylvania.  

“Wendy, huh?” Kyle asks with his eyebrows raised. They’re on Skype again, and Stan is trying to ignore his downright tragic, tight-fitting floral button up. “Are you two uh, you know.”

He makes a weird noise that sounds like a cheap mattress bed springs creaking, _skrrt skrrt skrrt_.  Stan laughs for roughly two minutes at the suggestion.  

“No, dude,” he says.  “Oh God.  No.  Wendy and I just used to be really close.  I thought it would be a good excuse to get out of town.  I’ve never actually visited her when I’ve been on the east coast.”

“Oh,” Kyle says, frowning a little.  He scratches at his beard uncomfortably, fingers disappearing into it as it continues to grow more and more out of control.  “I just thought, I mean, I remember you guys were like, girlfriend-boyfriend in elementary school.”

“Yeah, the key part of that being elementary school,” Stan says.  “She was just one of the few people who didn’t treat me like a car crash of a human being the first time I got back.  I haven’t seen her since uh, I relapsed during her sophomore year at school.  So I figured it was time to try and repair that friendship.”

“Okay,” Kyle says, but he doesn’t look like he believes Stan.  And if Stan’s being honest with himself, he’s not sure if he would stop Wendy if she wanted to fool around, because his sober sex drive is starting to melt his brain.  At this point he’s stopped pretending that he’s not thinking about Kyle in a creative variety of positions inside or around him when he’s beating off.  

He touches down in Philadelphia International twenty-four hours later, and finds Wendy in arrivals holding a white sign with a promotional picture of him when he was recording TOOLSHED.  She drops it to run up and give him a hug, and the first thing he says when he has his arms around her is, “I hate you so much, you jerk.”  

She sighs contently into his ear.  “You too,” she says.  “You look so good, Stan.”

They don’t sleep together, or even kiss the whole week he stays there, because he finds out even though he’s super horny all the time, the idea of making out with a girl still makes him want to hurl.  He does sleep with her in her tiny twin bed though, but even when they’re draped over each other at night it never feels the same sort of intimate as sharing a bed with Craig ever did, or have the same sexual undercurrent as Kyle’s stoned arms wrapped around his stomach did that one night in Portland.  He tells Kyle the first part over Skype one morning while Wendy is in class, and he savors the look of relief that washes over Kyle’s face.

They spend the week doing typical tourist things; Stan makes Wendy take him for cheesesteaks, and they walk the Washington Avenue Pier arm in arm like a couple.  But then Wendy takes Stan to the more industrial parts of the area, the suburbs where she’s been working on her urban ethnography thesis.  He doesn’t understand what she’s talking about when she explains it, but he’s so proud of her, so happy that he got to come out here and catch up and see what she’s been doing with her life.

He’s ready to fly home after the week is over, but he gets a text from Token Friday night saying he should come to New York instead, where he has a second apartment.  On a whim he rents a car and drives to New York the next day after giving Wendy the longest goodbye hug ever.  He spends the better part of another week there, and Stan is half-afraid that Token will trust him too much not to get in trouble, will take him somewhere that only the most damaging parts of Stan want to go, but instead Token takes him to a bunch of art museums, and makes him go for freezing, wet runs around his Brooklyn neighborhood, and they end up at one very lowkey house party where everyone is drinking wine out of mason jars, and Stan ends up playing guitar with Token and some other guy in someone’s living room.  Every night he Skypes with Kyle from the brittle old futon in Token’s living room where he sleeps.

Token offers him the apartment on Thursday when he’s getting ready for a photoshoot in Sao Paulo, but Stan declines.  He’s not necessarily ready to go back home, but he doesn’t trust himself in the big city unsupervised quite yet.  They leave for JFK together, and Token goes to his terminal while Stan buys the next ticket back to Denver.  He thinks briefly of calling Craig when he lands, but dismisses the idea and calls Kyle instead.

x

Stan barely leaves his studio for two weeks after he gets back, the two weeks he spent out of South Park overwhelming him with new inspiration.  Kenny stops by most nights with some leftovers from the bar, because Stan is notoriously terrible at feeding himself or taking care of himself in any manner when he’s feeling motivated about music.  He eventually has to physically force Stan to take a shower on the fifth day when he comes in and sees Stan in the same clothes that he came back from New York in, greasy hair matted to his forehead in awkward angles.  

“What would Kyle say?” Kenny asks, trying to pull Stan out towards the main house so he can wash his hair and change his underpants.  It’s the argument that finally convinces him to leave the studio.  

Kyle has been stuck in midterm hell, so while their Skype calls have continued they rarely talk most nights; Kyle studies on one side of the screen, while Stan tries to tease out various arrangements on his guitar on the other.  He does notice when Stan has showered, saying, “Oh thank God,” after Stan accepts their nightly video call wearing a clean shirt.

The only thing that Stan really makes time for outside of music is jacking off, which he does at least twice a day.  He chases orgasms like highs, laying out on the beat-up leather couch in the studio and fucking into his fist right up until the point of no return, where he’ll usually back off a little and try to see how long he can hold off until his dick can’t take anymore.  It’s the most satisfying alternative to going out and getting laid, which isn’t going to happen unless he makes the drive to Denver and begs Craig to fuck him.  He considers it very, very briefly, and then he thinks _screw it_ , and reaches into his pants.  

On the ninth day in studio, Stan is face down into the couch, sweating into the leather and biting his fist trying to hold off an orgasm when the familiar ting of a Skype call interrupts the sound of Colby Keller bouncing on some guy’s dick.  He looks at it for a second and sees Kyle’s name, and thinks about it: he could finish really quick and try to call Kyle back, or he could take a break, maybe come down just enough to ramp it back up after he finishes talking to Kyle, and have a really, really intense orgasm then.  He pulls his pants up, wincing at the tightness, and pauses the porn so he can answer Kyle’s call.

“Whoa dude,” Kyle says when he appears in the box next to a still shot of Keller, and Stan feels guilty when he realizes how similar they look with their beards.  “You look like you ran here.  What’s up?”

“Uh,” Stan says, rocking back and forth in an attempt to find a comfortable way to sit with a raging boner.  “Not much.  Just the usual, man.”

Kyle looks at him funny.  “You’re acting weird, dude.”

“I’m acting just fine, _dude_ ,” Stan replies, mimicking the slight Californian accent that Kyle has developed over the years. Kyle doesn’t look amused.  

“No, you’re not,” he says seriously.  “Listen, I don’t want to make assumptions, but uh.  I mean.”

“But?” Stan asks, challenging.

“Are you on something?” Kyle looks uncomfortable asking, looks uncomfortable for letting his mind even go there.  He might as well have punched Stan in the stomach, it hurts so much to hear coming out of his mouth.

“Fuck you,” Stan says, and then he rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand.  “No, dude.  I’m not.  You just kind of, uh, interrupted me having some uh, private Stan time.”

“Oh,” Kyle says, and then, “Oh! What the fuck, dude!  Really?”

“Yes, really! Why would I lie about that?”

“Why wouldn’t you?” Kyle asks honestly.  His eyes are wide with both horror and amusement.  “Why would you even answer the call?”

Stan doesn’t feel like explaining how he likes to prolong his orgasms as long as possible, how it’s the closest he can get to the peaks and valleys of amphetamines, how he’s going to come much harder with Kyle fresh on his mind than if he had ignored the call.  But then again, yes he does, yes, he wants to tell Kyle exactly how he likes to come, how much better it would be if Kyle was there to bring him to that high and push him over the edge, how badly he wants Kyle’s hands to be where his are, to reach where he can’t.

“Uh,” he says dumbly, dick throbbing against his jeans.  “I don’t know.  Thinking is hard when all the blood in my body is basically rushing away from my brain.”

Kyle chokes out a laugh.  “Fuck, you poor thing.  Do you need me to leave you alone?”

“No!” Stan says, a little too quick.  “Colby Keller can wait, don’t worry about it.  I could literally, ah, do this at anytime.”

“Colby Keller?” Kyle asks.  “Dude, were you watching gay porn?”

“Well, what the fuck else would I watch, Kyle?”

“I don’t know,” Kyle replies, and he looks so innocent and sweet for a second.  “Straight porn?  I just always assumed, I don’t know, that you were mostly straight.”

“Why would you think that?” Stan asks, palming at himself through the denim a little and trying not to moan out loud.  “I told you I dated Craig.”

“Yeah, but I always thought that was like--listen, I don’t fucking know.  I just know when we were little you and Wendy played house, and then you had all those really public tabloid relationships--”

“Jesus, Kyle, that’s what happens in Hollywood.  You think the producer I was fucking wanted the public to know?  Fuck no,” Stan practically spits out.  

“Oh,” Kyle says.  “Sorry.  So you’re like, uh.”

“Gay,” Stan says.  “I’m a big fucking homo, Kyle.”

“Okay.  Me too,” Kyle tells him, and Stan rolls his eyes.  

“I know that, man.  You had a boyfriend.  His name was Javier.  His picture is still on your wall.”

“No it’s not,” Kyle says.  “I took that down um, a few weeks ago.  Threw it away, actually.”

“Well,” Stan says, and he’s not sure if he should be frustrated or relieved.  “Good.  Good for you.”

Kyle nods.  “I mean, I could also be bisexual.  Just because you know I dated one guy.”

“Sure,” Stan says, but he’s doubts it.  “But you aren’t.”

“No,” Kyle says.  And then they stare at each other, and Stan tries not to touch himself or move in a direction that will be painful. And then Kyle says, “Can I see what you’re watching?”

“What!” Stan yells. “No! Why? How--how would I even do that?”

“I mean, you could send me the link or like, you can do a screen share on Skype where someone else can see your screen, see on that menu that says ‘share entire screen?’”

“Why would you want to see my porn?” Stan asks, but he’s already looking for the button.  He ends up clicking just the ‘Select to Share My Window’ button, and watches as Kyle’s face changes when the screen comes through.

“Oh,” Kyle says, looking at the still of Keller.  “That is.  Uncanny.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Stan says, feeling warmth rush up his back.  Kyle gives him a pointed look, but doesn’t say anything else about it.

“You should hit play, dude,” he says instead.  

“You’re gonna watch porn with me?” Stan asks, heart pounding wildly in his chest, dick fucking screaming in his pants.

“I got nothing better to do,” Kyle says. “And you look like you’re hurting, I mean, really bad.  Unless this is a you-thing.”

“No, no, this can be an,” he almost says “us thing” but stops himself.  Instead he just hits play again and Keller resumes rocking up and down on some bald guy, rolling back and forth on his heels to gain purchase on the guy’s fat dick.  

“Fuck,” Kyle says, and his eyes look glazed over with interest.  Keller moans from the back of his throat in the video, and Stan can’t help wonder, does Kyle make the same noises?  Would Kyle sink down on him like that, would Kyle bounce up and down so his dick would hit Stan in the stomach, leave a patch of sticky precome?  Or would Kyle let himself be pressed flush against the mattress, let Stan fuck him, lick at the sweat on the base of his neck, suck hickeys into his shoulders so everyone would know that he’d been there?  What noises would Kyle make then?

Stan slowly shifts back out of his pants, aware that Kyle can only see him from the torso up.  He briefly thinks of adjusting the camera so Kyle can see the way he touches himself with better clarity, can see his dick, can see how hard he is for Kyle.  He swallows back a moan and leaves the camera angle as it is, and starts pulling at himself again with urgency as Keller gets flipped over in the video so the other guy is fucking him on his back.  He looks toward Kyle’s screen and can see some sort of movement is happening off-camera.  There’s a flush crawling up Kyle’s neck and ears, and he’s starting to get a little breathy.  His mouth is open, and he’s sucking air in little gasps through his teeth, and Stan wants to kiss him, wants to kiss him so fucking bad.  He wants to blow his load all over Kyle’s perfect face, get it caught in his long eyelashes, his beard, wants to smear it on his cheeks and lick it off.

“Fuck,” he says, imagining it, imagining how amazing Kyle would look covered in his come, “fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Yeah?” Kyle says, and he’s got a finger in his mouth, between his teeth where Stan can see the pink of his tongue come up to greet it.  Before Kyle called, Stan had already backed down from two orgasms, and he can tell this is going to be over quickly, he’s fought this one off too long.  He tries to slow down his strokes but it’s of no use.

“Kyle are you,” he says breathily, eyebrows knit together with determination, “are you, are you close?”

“Uh-huh,” Kyle responds, nodding furiously. “Can be.”

“Wanna see your dick,” Stan says, before he can stop himself.  This is it, the point of no return.  “Wanna see you come.”

“You wanna see me come, Stan?” Kyle sneers when he says it.  “You want me to come for you?”

“Please,” Stan cries, so close, so close.  

“Okay,” Kyle says, and he stands up.  He pulls the hem of his shirt up into his teeth, so Stan can see the trail of red hair that leads down to his thick, swollen dick.  It’s shorter, but wide, and Stan thinks of the spit that would pool at the corners of his lips if he tried to fit it in his mouth.  

“Gonna,” Kyle says with his shirt still in his mouth, kneading near the base of his cock with one hand and stroking roughly with the other, “gonna, fuck, ah, fuck.”

He comes in thick, sluggish ropes across his own stomach, groaning with each one, and it’s perfect, it’s fucking art in motion is what it is.  Stan has completely forgotten about the actual video they’ve got on, instead finally coming for what seems like a decade at the sight of Kyle’s seed rolling down his stomach.  “Jesus, Kyle,” he bites out.  “Holy shit.”

There’s a huge mess all over his hand and his own shirt when he looks down, honestly an impressive amount of jizz, he thinks dumbly to himself.  Kyle is giggling throatily on screen, having grabbed some tissues to wipe himself off as he sits back down.  He sounds stoned, fuck, Stan feels stoned.  He pulls his shirt off to clean himself, the thing ruined for the time being anyway.

“That was like, Top Five best ideas I’ve ever had,” Kyle says.  

“No shit,” Stan says dazed, collapsing backwards into the couch.  “Can that happen again?”

“Gimme like, fifteen minutes, gotta recover,” Kyle says, and Stan smiles. He can wait.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this started as a distraction from a much larger fic and just turned into a sprawling mess. title shamelessly stolen from real estate's "green aisles". thanks for reading! comments appreciated. you can also hang out with me on [ tumblr](http://hellomorningzoo.tumblr.com/).


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